Seven Minutes to Noon

old happiness like a river at her feet.
    “I’m still in love with Simon.”
    “Well, that’s no surprise, Mags. But I thought you made a decision.”
    “I did.”
    Alice stood back and looked at Maggie and waited. She could tell there was more.
    “Look, Alice, we sleep together now and then.”
    This was news. “But you’re divorced!”
    “Not exactly.” Maggie’s face creaked open with a naughty smile.
    “But you said—”
    “I told you the papers had come through. We simply never signed them.”
    Suddenly Alice understood. With Maggie’s typical lack of discipline, in the rush of her irreverence, she had shared secrets with Simon, little offerings to bind him to their endangered intimacy. Things he probably didn’t even care about, like the gender of Lauren’s baby, providing him with a blip of amusement or interest. Like a spy Maggie had passed Ivy on to Simon, who had passed her on to Tim. Now that Alice realized what had happened, it made sense. Maggie and Simon’s passion had always spilled over their ability to contain it, messily invading the space of innocent bystanders.
    Alice stood across from Maggie. The peonies loomed beside them.
    “I understand,” Alice said quietly.
    “I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t mean to tell him. It just slipped out. And I certainly never imagined I’d be questioned by the police about it.”
    The thought of Maggie explaining herself to the detectives seemed punishment enough.
    As the morning progressed, Alice felt a bubbling of anger at Maggie for having withheld such a significant piece of information, not that Maggie and Simon were lovers again, but that Tim had known the baby was a girl. No wonder Frannie and Giometti kept hashing over the same stories, having been given reason to question the friends’ reliability.
    Maybe they were right, Alice thought, as she headed home just after one o’clock. She walked down Smith Street lugging groceries in several plastic bags whosehandles cut into her fingers. The labor of carrying the heavy bags and the pain it caused her felt deserved. She had pushed Frannie to investigate Tim, her friend, when all along another friend had held the answer. Alice felt betrayed by herself, but also by Maggie for the lie of omission that had led her to the misstep. Much as Maggie had felt betrayed by Simon for never explaining his hours-long absences, and as Frannie had undoubtedly experienced a betrayal, hidden beneath the friendly veneer, when Alice marched into the precinct to announce her own lie of omission.
    Alice turned onto President Street, and felt the draining force of her pregnancy. She took a deep breath and marched forward.
    As she walked toward their house, past summer gardens lush with impatiens and marigolds and no Lauren — everywhere she went, no Lauren — she became aware of an incessant honking. She noticed the jammed traffic, then the moving truck two-thirds down the block, its girth blocking the flow.
    That was right, she remembered now: their new landlord was moving in today.
    She walked up the stoop into the shadowy front hall, set her bags down on the floor outside her own entrance and called up the wide stairs.
    “Hello?”
    She immediately heard a rumble of footsteps and a large man came down the stairs. He was wearing gray sweatpants that had been cut off into shorts, but his legs didn’t merit them; they were heavy and pale, with sparse black hairs. He was sweating in a white sleeveless undershirt through which his stomach bulged. His curly pitch-black hair was obviously dyed, and his face was flaccid, jowly. But what most struck Alice, truly surprised her, was his glasses. They were trendy in a way he clearly was not, minimalist rectangles in plastic lilac frames. He hadn’t shaved that morning, but it was his moving day, so it was understandable. Alice decided she would forceherself to accept this man, if only out of a survivor’s instinct.
    She offered a hand. “I’m Alice Halpern.”
    He shook her hand without bothering to wipe off the sweat. She held her smile.
    “Julius Pollack,” he said in a syrupy voice that reminded her, strangely, of yellowed lacquer.
    He made hard, immediate eye contact and seemed to wait for her to speak.
    “Mr. Pollack,” she began, bolstering her tone with confidence, professionalism; holding herself still against his keen stare. “I don’t know exactly how much Joey told you about our situation. We asked him to explain. We—”
    “He told me you